PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti -- Former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide on
Thursday called for peaceful legislative and local elections in Haiti,
hours after a
grenade explosion in front of election council headquarters injured several
people.

"We must all make peace so that we can all live in peace," Aristide said
in a
message aired on the private Radio Metropole.

Aristide, who remains an influential though controversial figure in this
impoverished Caribbean nation of 7.5 million people, has been widely criticized
for his silence in recent years in the face of escalating political violence.

Preval: 'Don't vote division'

Also on Thursday, President Rene Preval urged Haitians to vote for members
of
Aristide's party in this weekend's legislative and local elections.

"Don't vote division, vote union, so that 2001 can be an all-out success,"
Preval
told a Flag Day assembly, using a Lavalas party slogan. He spoke in the
west
coast town of Arcahaie.

Aristide -- Preval's predecessor and mentor -- is widely expected to run
for
a second term as president in December national elections.

Haiti's most popular politician, he was elected president in 1990, ousted
in an
army coup in 1991 and restored to power after a 1994 U.S.-led intervention.

Haiti was scheduled to hold legislative and municipal elections in November
1998, but the polls were put off to November 1999 and postponed several
more times before being set for this Sunday, with runoffs for June 25.

5 injured in attack

Aristide's call for peace came after a grenade was set off late Wednesday
in front
of the Provisional Electoral Council, or CEP, on a busy road in the capital.
Evans
Paul, spokesman for the opposition Espace de Concertation coalition party,
said
the attack was "part of a strategy to discourage people from going to vote."

Police said shrapnel injured five people, but victims at the State University
of
Haiti hospital said three passers-by were hurt.

CEP President Leon Manus on Thursday condemned the grenade attack and said
electoral officials were determined to go ahead with the elections.

'We refuse to participate'

Opposition candidates blocked access to election offices in Gonave Island
in
Port-au-Prince Bay on Thursday, claiming that only Lavalas Family partisans
had
been assigned to run voting stations.

"We refuse to participate in elections controlled by Aristide partisans,"
opposition
parliamentary candidate Daniel Bertrand said in a telephone interview.
"Armed
Aristide partisans have threatened to kill us, and the police are in cahoots
with
them."

Police beat and jailed another parliamentary candidate, Fritzner Eliasaint,
during
an opposition demonstration in the island town of Anse-a-Galets, Bertrand
said.

Prime Minister Jacques-Edouard Alexis, in an address to the nation on
Wednesday, guaranteed police would provide full security during the elections
and called on all voters to cast their ballots on Sunday.

At least a dozen political killings have occurred since late March. Several
politicians, journalists, and human rights workers have gone into hiding.

Sunday's elections will fill several thousand empty posts nationwide including
the
parliament, which Preval dissolved in January 1999 to end a political impasse.